Half Life

April 1, 2020
A stressed-out high school student finds herself living the plot of a science-fiction thriller with her self-possessed clone. Sixteen-year-old Lucille Harper feels like she's just another "privileged, straight white girl with a four-point-oh from a Mountain State." Her sardonic inner thoughts reveal her ever present fear that she's not good enough for anybody--not the Ivy Leagues, not the boy she likes, and not her best friend, Cass, a popular beauty (cued as black) who's been spending her time with her new boyfriend. Plus, Lucille's parents are getting divorced. It's the perfect time for a shadowy corporation to offer her a clone of herself. Lucille, finally feeling good enough for somebody, figures she'll get a much-needed assistant; meanwhile, Dr. Thompson, another ambitious white woman, needs a working prototype. It takes the snarky defiance of clone Lucy to show Lucille that the consequences of her rashness could hurt a lot more people than her original self. Jumpy at first, the dual narration picks up speed when corporate human rights violations add deadly urgency to more garden-variety teen drama. Occasionally, long-winded dialogue and '90s references make the characters seem more like adult millennials than contemporary teens, but the casual use of "allo" restores a modern sensibility. A hopeful, sensational take on the clone morality tale told in an adept, amusing voice. (Science fiction. 15-18)

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June 1, 2020

Gr 9 Up-Aware that she is a privileged white girl, Lucille Harper is still one pretty insecure teen. Her academic ambitions make her feel socially awkward, but she can't give them up. When her best friend Cass begins a serious relationship with another sophomore, Lucille's jealousy distances her from the one person she trusts and Lucille realizes she doesn't quite have it all. Enticed by the advertising slogan "Better than perfect" for a company called Life2, or Life Squared, Lucille rashly agrees to allow herself to be cloned, knowing she should not have signed the company's nondisclosure agreement, or produced a fake ID to pass as 18. Nevertheless, she and Lucy-her Facsimile, as she's called-allow Lucille to double her opportunities for improvement. Alternating chapters by character mitigates some but not all of the narrative confusion as Lucille meets Marco at a summer job and experiences her first romance, leaving Lucy to cover for her at school when classes resume. But this doppelganger has the same crush on another boy, Bode, that Lucille did, and maybe still does. Clark's neat take on the relationship between the cloned and the replica is that Lucille still doesn't have it all, and what she does have, Lucy may be even better at. The overachiever is such a familiar character type, but Clark makes this territory fresh, and teens questioning their own self-worth will be drawn to this novel. VERDICT A miserable perfectionist grows into herself while discovering she's only human, in a novel that is near-future enough to appeal to sci-fi fans as well as general audiences who like to ask, "What if?"-Georgia Christgau, LaGuardia Community Coll., Long Island City, NY

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2020
Grades 9-12 Overachieving 16-year-old Lucille Harper's single-minded focus on perfection is starting to push her friends away. As her prestigious summer internship starts, her summer college course proves difficult, and her parents announce their divorce, Lucille is contacted by a company called Life2 with a cryptic, irresistible promise to help her Do More. Be More. After signing an NDA with a fake ID, she agrees to beta test their human-cloning technology and allow her facsimile to replace her for a four-week field test. But instead of being someone Lucille can simply delegate her obligations to, Lucy comes with a mind of her own. Lucille has only until the end of the trial not just to figure out who she wants to be, but also to decide if she agrees with Life2 that Lucy is little more than property. Like a PG-13 mash-up of Booksmart and Black Mirror, Clark's (Immoral Code, 2019) sophomore novel delivers both twisty sf suspense and a highly relatable account of the search for self-determination and self-worth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)